From Beyond Time

Because of his jutting cheekbones, the nicks the church priest had left while shaving him harmonized with his long, white, upturned eyebrows and stirred up a separate kind of irritation in his grandfather’s stern face, which already looked uneasy. For the first time he saw the short white hair his grandfather always laid back combed to the right. Even the dullness of death had failed to change his grandfather, yet it made him look like a man X had never seen before. The change in the shape of his hair had unsettled him.

The priest looked at the old man in the walnut coffin with tulip carvings and, as if seeking God’s approval more than anyone’s, asked, “Do you like it, sir?”

The priest could have taken the failure to appreciate his effort not as his own incompetence but as contempt for his faith. At every funeral he heard the admiration and praise of hypocritical cowards, people who, wherever there were eyes to see, would call this slapdash job flawless, a job that should have made anyone uneasy, simply because a stain of holiness had splashed onto it. He had heard it so often that he had started to get used to ugliness, to love what he was used to, and to sanctify what he loved. He believed his talent was a gift from God. His soul, admired by everyone, must have risen above many souls and gained seniority before God, for he could feel it throughout his whole body. The priest was dead certain of his own holiness. He was very close to discovering his first miracle.

After ten minutes of waiting for an answer, the priest’s hope seemed to have run out. Turning to X, he said, “Just before his presence left this church, he must have looked at himself one last time and seen that I had chosen the right suit for him. Do not grieve. His journey is only beginning.” For a brief moment he had become a conqueror who freed the church from the occupation of silence.

X looked at his grandfather again, stopped for a short while, and said, “His journey seems to have ended long ago...”

The priest raised both hands at the same speed and slowly took hold of X’s shoulders. In the darkness of his own eyes he waited, eye to eye, until he had gained the time to take X’s gaze captive. Whatever he said afterward was, for X, nothing but background noise.

The thousands-of-years-old lie that came out of the priest’s mouth in a divine tone and filled X from within carried the smell of Sufism. It stung the back of his nose and brought the taste of his anger into his mouth. With every passing minute, the priest’s effort to keep talking made the allure of silence more inviting.

To shut him up, X blurted out something absurd.

“Could I borrow your comb?”

The priest, bewildered, gestured at his hair, which had fallen out completely.

X smoothed his grandfather’s stiffened hair back with his hands. Then he turned to the priest. “Now I like it. Would you leave me alone with my grandfather?”

When he heard the wooden door close behind the priest, who walked away with heavy steps, he looked at his grandfather once more.

Death was cold.

The face was blank, and that blankness said the body had stopped being his a long time ago. In a few days it would begin to rot under the earth, and even the last blood that had moved in his veins would be gone. The flesh would let go of the bone. The man who had once thought, flared up, and laughed would come apart quietly in the dark. What would be left was a face the people who knew him remembered less and less clearly, and underground a body nobody would have the nerve to look at to see what had become of it.

Perhaps this was why people had convinced themselves that they felt no pain after death. A lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed she had felt pain during surgery although she was under anesthesia had been talked about for some time, even at the churches’ Sunday services. To some, what she told was a lie; to others, a sign of a dark truth reaching beyond the body.

A single question appeared in X’s mind:

“What if the pain doesn’t end when we die?”

He stared at the blankness of his grandfather’s face. There might be a scream behind it that nobody could hear. Maybe death silenced the body and left the mind awake. Lying awake under the ground, unable to move, unable to open your eyes, feeling yourself rot, in a place where you couldn’t even call for help, with no idea when the dark would end, and finding out that way what eternity meant.

X felt himself flinch.

He remembered that his grandfather had not wanted to be cremated. Was there a reason for it, or was X loading his own fears onto the old man’s last wishes? Perhaps the answer lay inside that motionless body, somewhere no one could reach anymore. These ten minutes of silence he had spent with his grandfather were a record for the old man. After a lifetime of talking, this genius had listened for so long for the first time. Known as the most brilliant mind of the last hundred years, in his final days he could not stand to listen to anyone for more than five minutes.

That he had been born into a community where geniuses were recognized and appreciated would, when the time came, be remembered as humanity’s good fortune. That fortune had let him direct his talents to the right places, develop them, and have more opportunities to use them.

The discovery he had dug up from a time far beyond his own was loosening the laws of classical, modern, and quantum physics. It was breaking the rules of physics that would not conform and casting them out of the universe, never to work again. It was forcing the laws of physics to evolve, in the truest sense of the word. The old man knew he had brought the greatest discovery in human history to light. This discovery, which shaped the universal laws of the cosmos, was opening the doors of every impossibility those laws had forbidden, and breaking down the doors that resisted opening.

After losing control of his discovery, the old man had fallen into helplessness and isolated himself to face the consequences. Yesterday morning he had eaten breakfast, read while drinking his coffee, and written while listening to compositions hundreds of years old. After finishing feeding his only friend, he had decided not to begin another day. In the mysterious moment when one day ended and the next did not begin, he had killed himself, choosing never to have existed in the world’s thirteen-billion-year history.

For X it was an ordinary day. At some hour, the sound of the wooden door was heard again. By the time X got home it was already two in the morning, and there was only one question in his mind:

Why were human beings afraid of death? Was it because they would lose their existence, or because one day they would not even be able to know that they no longer existed?

He filled his pipe and lit it. He took a deep breath, held the smoke in his lungs for a short while, then let it out slowly. As the smoke rose heavily through the darkness of the room, the thought in his mind changed shape along with it.

If the laws of physics held even at the beginning of the universe, then God would have had no freedom to choose the initial conditions. Together with the smoke hanging in the air, the idea spread out and thinned away. When the air cleared, he found himself eye to eye with his own reflection in the mirror. He watched himself for a while. Then, as though someone else were sitting across from him, he asked:

“So how much freedom of choice did God have when creating the universe? Before God set the laws of the universe and pressed the start button, which laws was He Himself subject to?”

The question had no answer. Worse, the question itself did not stand on solid ground. In a model where time, space, and the laws of physics came into being together with the universe, what did it mean to ask what had existed before the universe? If time did not yet exist, what did the word before refer to? The very concepts he reached for to explain God’s existence lost their meaning the moment he began to question that existence.

Did the universal laws that allowed the universe to contain complex structures like human beings, who investigate themselves and question their own existence and the nature of God, have no effect on God?

But what troubled X most was not whether God was affected by gravity. The real question was whether any being could be exempt from the rules it had set for itself. The existence of a lawgiver did not prove that it could stand outside its own laws.

X drew one last breath from his pipe. The ember he left in the ashtray flared for a moment in the darkness, then went out.

As he lay down, one last question spilled from between his lips:

Could the human mind, searching for the beginning of everything, not be condemned to keep chasing its own tail inside an endless chain of causes?

X closed his eyes. The clock on the wall went on cutting the seconds apart. Somewhere in the universe a star was going out, there was life on worlds its light had not reached yet, and far-off galaxies were sinking into their own darkness without needing anyone to witness it. Nothing had stopped because one man was falling asleep. Nothing was keeping him in existence.

In the middle of all this indifference X’s consciousness went out quietly. There was no mark where it had been, no gap to show it was gone. A minute earlier that same mind had believed it could work out the secrets of the universe. Now it did not know it existed.